PLEASANTON, CA -- (Marketwire) -- 02/28/13 -- Percona, the company that makes MySQL faster and more reliable, today announced that Pricefalls has standardized on Percona Server for its online marketplace and auction website, replacing MySQL Community Edition. As a transaction site supporting more than 10 million products, Pricefalls requires a stable, secure and easily replicated database that supports high transaction volumes. With Percona Server, the company has achieved more than a 400 percent performance increase, gained greater insight into transactions, and improved its transaction tracking and data mining capabilities, all while controlling costs.

Prior to Percona Server, Pricefalls used MySQL Community Edition but struggled with issues related to stability, security, and replication. Based on a recommendation from a member of the Pricefalls board of directors, the company implemented Percona Server.

"On the day we made the switch to Percona Server, about four hours into running it in our production environment, we saw upwards of a 400 percent performance increase," said Peter Schaefer, co-founder and CIO of Pricefalls. "There were no changes in data or transactions. This was simply from switching out the engine."

Schaefer had encountered Percona years earlier while trying to solve a database structure issue. When he read "High Performance MySQL," a book co-authored by Percona Co-founder and CEO Peter Zaitsev, Percona Co-founder and CTO Vadim Tkachenko, and others, he "...got hooked on the MySQL knowledge and resources that Percona puts out to the public. They make a very valuable contribution to the MySQL community."

Since Pricefalls' initial success with Percona Server, the company has been replacing all of its data center MySQL instances with Percona. Along with performance benefits, Percona Server provides far more insight into actual transactions, which will be critical as Pricefalls rolls out a new platform in 2013. At that time, Pricefalls will likely be supporting approximately one million records each day, so the new platform will need to mine far more data.

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"Percona has taken the MySQL Community Edition engine and built out something so robust, stable, and scalable that it's the obvious choice for companies like Pricefalls that must keep costs down without sacrificing performance in order to stay competitive," added Schaefer.

"The Pricefalls experience is being repeated every day, all around the world," said Zaitsev. "While Percona Server is open source and therefore provides a significant cost benefit to organizations, it is also a tremendous technical achievement, offering excellent performance along with very high reliability and security."

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